Statisticians outperform Eurovision betting markets

In a show that ranged from a hip thrusting Moldovan saxophonist to a windpipe-backed Armenian singing about the apricot stone in her head, Germany's Lena captured the 55th Eurovision Song Contest. This result was a triumph for the five (out of 22) teams from Kaggle's Forecast Eurovision Voting competition that predicted Lena would win.

The winner of Kaggle's contest was Jure Žbontar, a 25 year old computer scientist from the University of Ljubiana (the capital of Slovenia). Hopefully we'll hear more from Jure over the next few days. Dr Derek Gatherer, a virologist from the University of Glasgow who submitted on behalf of the BBC's More or Less, finished runner up. See the full Forecast Eurovision Voting results.

How did the Kaggle consensus perform? The consensus tipped Lena to finish second behind runaway favourite Safura from Azerbaijan. Interestingly, Kaggle's statisticians outperformed the prediction markets, selecting seven of the countries that finished in the top ten, compared with five for the prediction markets.

One reason that statisticians may have outperformed the punters is that number crunchers can better assimilate voting patterns. Georgia and Greece, both countries that benefit from voting partnerships, appear in the Kaggle top ten but not in the betting markets top ten. Meanwhile Israel, a country that has no obvious voting partners appears lower down in the consensus ranking. Some have argued that the new voting system has put an end to political voting. However, it's not difficult to pick out patterns in this year's data. (Unless you think Georgians saw something that others missed in Belarus's soporific performance when they allocated the maximum 12 votes to Belarus - the other 38 countries collectively awarded Belarus just six votes.)

Another reason why the consensus among statisticians may have been more accurate is that prediction markets may be skewed by sympathies, while models tend to screen out emotions. Doubters might argue that individual punters may be emotional but that emotions average out in a large prediction market. This is likely to be true to an extent, however it's almost certainly the case that emotion plays a greater roll in betting markets than in a consensus among statisticians. (The existence of the favourite-longshot bias suggests an emotional aspect to betting markets.)

Finally, the betting-market data itself might have an impact on the outcome. This year, pre-contest favourites seemed unwilling to allocate votes to each other. Azerbaijan awarded Germany just one vote when other countries awarded Germany an average of 6.5. Germans returned the favour by not sparing a single vote for Azerbaijan.

#

Kaggle Consensus

Betting Markets*

Actual Results

1

Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan

Germany

2

Germany

Germany

Turkey

3

Armenia

Israel

Romania

4

Norway

Armenia

Denmark

5

Denmark

Denmark

Azerbaijan

6

Sweden

Sweden

Belgium

7

Turkey

Ireland

Armenia

8

Israel

Norway

Greece

9

Greece

Croatia

Georgia

10

Georgia

Turkey

Ukraine

* Betting market information from http://www.oddschecker.com/specials/tv/eurovision/win-market just before the first semi-final

Cool. Based on this, the consensus forecast would make money in expectation if you could back out implied odds. I have a feeling Kaggle would be better than the betting markets for everything that involves amateurs and some form of prejudice like the World Cup or elections. You should do the World Cup although I imagine an algorithm that picks random numbers weighted towards choosing Spain will do better than anything else.

Actually you should do a World Cup based on a number of moments. E.g Highest scoring team, best defensive team, most cards per game, etc. They would be harder to just guess.

Anthony Goldbloom

We could also use a probabilistic methodology to amp up the signal-to-noise ratio. http://economics.com.au/?p=5298. Problem is that there's probably not enough time to get the data together.

John Maindonald

If I read Anthony's comments correctly, he suggests that the betting agencies may be more influenced by emotional factors than the statisticians with their models. That may be correct. Perhaps however. a bigger factor is that the betting agencies are looking over each other's shoulders. Statisticians working with different modeling approaches may get a bit closer to independence. Different modelers and modeling approaches will emphasize different features of the data, thus over-fitting in different ways. The consensus, being relatively unaffected by individual model biases, will be less prone to overfit with respect to the target.

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UhOhDaeSu

The same statisticians should also be saying that this is only one trial, and that we should not rush to draw too many conclusions about the potential causes of the apparent superiority of the modellers from this one sample.

Also it would be preferable betting market information from Betfair and not from Oddschecker. The Betfair market is a purer, more decentralised price finding mechanism, with more independent participants. The odds compilers at individual betting firms will follow the Betfair prices but will also adjust them to finesse the liabilities on their particular books. The betting firms are not purely interested in finding the "true" price but in the market price - i.e. adjusting to cope with order flow - and have more controls imposed upon them in terms of risk management by their bosses which skew their prices.

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FIRSTLIGHT

The discrepancy between the actual results and those predictions is very obvious when you look at how they rated Turkey. Turkey came in second on the actual results while the so called automated models
predicted 7th place the best.

This happens if you ignore domain knowledge and just crunch data. Anybody who follows the Eurovision contest a bit, knows that a number of European countries have large Turkish immigrant population who affect that country's votes for Turkey.

Just because they predicted Germany will win does not mean they sucked.

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Euromania

Anybody have any predictions for Eurovision 2012? Will the grannies win?